In the Woods

He shrugged heavily. "Much as you'd expect. Jessica tried to kill herself. Went to bed and cut her wrists with my razor."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "Is she all right?"

One corner of his mouth twitched in a humorless smile. "Yeah. Luckily she made a balls of it: cut across instead of down, or some such."

I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand around the flame-it was a windy day, purplish clouds starting to gather. "Can I ask you a question?" I said. "Strictly off the record?"

He looked at me: a dark, hopeless look tinged with something like contempt. "Why not."

"You knew, didn't you?" I said. "You knew all along."

He said nothing for a long time, so long that I wondered if he was going to ignore the question. Eventually he sighed and said, "Not knew. She couldn't have done it herself, she was with her cousins, and I didn't know anything about this lad Damien. But I wondered. I've known Rosalind all her life. I wondered."

"And you didn't do anything." I had meant my voice to be expressionless, but a note of accusation must have slipped in. He could have told us on the first day what Rosalind was; he could have told someone years earlier, when Katy first started getting sick. Although I knew that quite possibly this would have made no difference to anything at all, in the long run, I couldn't help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.

Jonathan tossed away his cigarette butt and turned to face me, hands shoved into the pockets of his overcoat. "What do you think I should have done?" he demanded in a low, hard voice. "She's my daughter, too. I'd already lost one. Margaret won't hear a word against her; years ago I wanted to send Rosalind to a psychologist, about the amount of lies she told, and Margaret got hysterical and threatened to leave me, take the girls with her. And I didn't know

anything. I would have had fuck-all to tell you. I kept an eye on her and prayed it was some property developer. What would you have done?"

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "Quite possibly exactly what you did." He kept staring at me, breathing fast, his nostrils flaring slightly. I turned away and drew on my cigarette; after a while I heard him take a deep breath and lean back against the wall again.

"Now I've something to ask you," he said. "Did Rosalind have it right about you being that boy whose friends disappeared?"

The question didn't surprise me. He had the right to see or hear footage of all interviews with Rosalind, and at some level I think I had always expected him to ask, sooner or later. I knew I should deny it-the official story was that I had, legally if a little callously, made up the whole disappearance thing to gain Rosalind's trust-but I didn't have the energy, and I couldn't see the point. "Yeah," I said. "Adam Ryan."

Jonathan turned his head and looked at me for a long time, and I wondered what hazy memories he was trying to match to my face.

"We had nothing to do with that," he said, and the undertone in his voice-gentle, almost pitying-startled me. "I want you to know that. Nothing at all."

"I know," I said, eventually. "I'm sorry I went for you."

He nodded a few times, slowly. "I'd probably have done the same thing, in your place. And it's not as if I was some holy innocent. You saw what we did to Sandra, didn't you? You were there."

"Yeah," I said. "She's not going to press charges."

He moved his head as if the thought disturbed him. The river was dark and thick-looking, with an oily, unhealthy sheen. There was something in the water, a dead fish maybe, or a rubbish spill; the seagulls were screaming over it in a whirling frenzy.

"What are you going to do now?" I asked, inanely.

Jonathan shook his head, staring up at the lowering sky. He looked exhausted-not the kind of exhaustion that can be healed by a good night's sleep or a holiday; something bone-deep and indelible, settled in puffy grooves around his eyes and mouth. "Move house. We've had bricks through the windows, and someone spray-painted PEDAPHILE on the car-he couldn't spell, whoever he was, but the message came across clear enough. I can stick it out till the motorway thing is settled, one way or the other, but after that…"

Allegations of child abuse, no matter how baseless they may seem, have to be checked out. The investigation into Damien's accusations against Jonathan had found no evidence to substantiate them and a considerable amount to contradict them, and Sex Crime had been as discreet as was humanly possible; but the neighbors always know, by some mysterious system of jungle drums, and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire.